Summary
Ismail Kadare: The Dictator's Call
A short, seemingly harmless phone call became a symbol of fear in totalitarian regimes. In June 1934, at the height of the political purges, Stalin invited Boris Pasternak. The conversation lasted only a few minutes, but it has been talked about for decades. In the last book he published, a classic of European literature, Ismail Kadare, through thirteen variants of this telephone conversation, concluded what could have been said then. Looking for it, Kadare writes an exciting novel about the nature of the power, fear and responsibility of the artist. Through a precise analysis of documents and a strong literary imagination, in this book he shows how a short encounter can become a metaphor for a system in which every word is dangerous and silence is sometimes fatal. The Dictator's Call is not just a story about a telephone conversation, it is primarily a story about the fate of artists in the time of dictatorship, but also about the border between courage and caution, truth and survival.
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